With the advent and proliferation of the Internet, the network interaction experience has been continually enriched over the years and much development continues. Most of the network development has been due in large part to network users desiring new ways of communicating more efficiently. One of the most basic applications afforded by the Internet is email. The introduction of email has changed the way that businesses are run. Now, rather than sending out a company wide memorandum to each employee, one only needs to send an email to all employees of the company. Meetings can be scheduled and rescheduled if necessary with the simple click of a few buttons. Indeed, simple communications are now primarily achieved through email due to its convenience.
However, there are still many instances where email is not the preferred medium of communication. One downside of email is that it is not real time and not face-to-face. Real time conversations, especially voice, video, and face-to-face conversations, allow communicating participants to perceive the speaker's tone of voice and body language, which adds another dimension of communication. Because more information can be perceived from a real time communication session, many people still use older forms of communication that do not require typing or transcription.
Obviously, there are multiple reasons to employ different forms of communication. There may be certain situations that warrant the use of email to converse with other people. On the other hand, there are other situations where the use of a telephone, videophone, short message service (SMS) messages, or instant messaging (IM) service is more desirable. For these reasons it is not uncommon for people to hold a conversation using multiple media formats.
In today's business world much communication is accomplished using multiple media formats. One person may send out a mass email to a number of other people informing them of a meeting that has been planned for later in the week. This initiating email may prompt a number of responses from the recipients of the original email. Some responses may be in the form of email, while other responses may include another type of text media. Still other people may wish to reply to the initiator by picking up the phone and calling him/her. In the event that the initiator is not at his/her desk to answer the phone, the caller places a voice message with the initiator. This flurry of responses back and forth between multiple people using multiple media types may continue for an extended period of time. When a person that was not around to see the initial email returns to his/her desk, they may be inundated with the number of emails, voice mails, video mails, and text messages that have accumulated in his/her inbox. To come up to speed with the conversation that is occurring, the person has to read through each email and listen to each voice mail to ensure that no content was missed. Only after all messages have been listened to, read, and viewed can the person feel that he/she can respond to the most recent messages with some sort of understanding of the conversation.
The burden associated with reading each email and text message and listening to every voice mail is that the recipient will likely have to read a single sentence or paragraph over and over again and listen to repetitive content. Revisiting the same content just to ensure that all content has been read and heard makes the recipient become inefficient. One possible way to avoid this inefficiency is to read the last email in the string of emails or listen to the last voice mail associated with the initiated email. Regrettably, reading the final email in the thread does not ensure that the person is aware of all the branches of the thread as it progressed.
There is a need for a system that combines multiple contacts, whether voice, video, or text, into a comprehensive contact that succinctly describes an entire conversation. There is also a need for a system that can generate personalized comprehensive contacts that reflect the conversation, as a particular user would have experienced it during the conversation. Moreover, there is a need for a way of generating a single document that can be viewed and shared by all conversational participants.